Category: COVID through 2022

Anything about COVID-19 and children hits the “fear” nerve pretty solidly.  The U.K. variant is now being blamed for COVID-19 outbreaks in Michigan schools. I don’t think there’s any good evidence to suggest that Michigan’s current school outbreaks are due to the spread of the U.K. variant.

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Are Michigan high-school outbreaks due to the U.K. variant?

Children and the U.K. variant?  I first became aware of the U.K. COVID-19 variant at the end of last year (Post #932).  At that time, I read that it seemed to favor spreading among school-age children.  (You can see that said, for example,  here.)  But I didn’t know what to make of that, because a) it didn’t make much sense and more importantly, b) later research dismissed that.  The story now is that the British found it among school children at first because schools were one of the few social settings in Britain that remained open when that variant was initially spreading.

So I don’t really know what to make of that.  Does it or doesn’t it spread faster among school children?  I think the most recent research says that the U.K. variant does not disproportionately attack children.

Michigan and the U.K. variant.  Second, I’ve been using the Helix COVID-19 dashboard to track the incidence of the U.K. variant in the U.S.  I knew that it didn’t cover every state, but because it is the only source from which you can infer incidence, I took it as the source of record. But they don’t seem to cover Michigan.

Problem is, per the U.S. CDC, there are a lot of U.K. variant cases in Michigan.  Michigan has the second-highest count of any state, although that cannot be interpreted as showing second-highest incidence.  That doesn’t show up on the Helix map, presumably because they don’t have working relationships with many Michigan labs.  And so I have been ignoring that.

The upshot is that the CDC dashboard suggests that the U.K. variant is highly prevalent in Michigan.  It’s just that it’s not clear how prevalent it is, based on what the CDC is able to show.

Michigan and children.  Third, as I discovered in Post #1055, Michigan’s new COVID-19 cases are now concentrated among high-school-aged children and young adults.  And now I’m seeing news reporting that is connecting those dots, and claiming that Michigan is seeing school outbreaks due to the U.K. variant.

So, is that a coincidence or not?  Does the U.K. variant favor spread among children?  Or are we just seeing post hoc propter hoc reporting?  Michigan has the U.K. variant, Michigan has school outbreaks.  But are they related?

I went to Florida to try to figure this out.  Florida appears to be leading the U.S. in terms of incidence of the U.K. variant.  And the short answer is that new cases in Florida are not concentrated disproportionately among school children.

My conclusion is that whatever is going on in Michigan, that’s something unique to Michigan.  If the U.K. variant had some hugely disproportionate impact on school children, that ought to be showing up in Florida as well.  And it’s not.

New cases in Michigan are definitely on the rise.  So they may in fact be the first real test of what the greater infectiousness of the U.K. variant can do.  But I think it’s not correct to state that the school outbreaks there are due to the U.K. variant.

I have been tracking the progress of COVID-19 vaccination in Fairfax County. As shown above, today (3/17/2021) they are scheduling appointments for those who signed up on 2/1/2021.

Separately, I’ve been reading the many negative comments that are posted on every Washington Post article about vaccination.  Many of them are from people who have a very good reason to be vaccinated, or who have been seeking vaccination for an extremely frail or elderly family member.

I think I have finally been able to put two and two together.  At least, in so far as Virginia’s approach to COVID-19 vaccination goes.

Here goes:  Within the general vaccination program, run by the county, there is no prioritization within qualifying groups.  Once a group of individuals qualifies, then its strictly first-come, first-served.  Continue reading Post #1061: A brief note on vaccination priorities.

The only reason that’s worth mention is that this is the first “real” daily uptick in the national COVID-19 new-case rate since early January.  (The increase following the mid-February winter event and Texas power outage can plausibly be attributed to a glitch in data reporting over that period.) Continue reading Post #1058: Trend to 3/15/2021, slight uptick

Otherwise, just read yesterday’s post. There’s no strong trend.

New cases are rising modestly in the Midwest.  That’s due to Minnesota and Michigan.  And within those states, a quick look at the data yesterday showed that was concentrated among high-school youth and young adults.  By contrast, among the elderly, cases are falling there, as elsewhere, presumably due to the high rate of vaccination.

Otherwise, if there’s any pattern here related to the presumably more-infectious variants of COVID-19 (such as the U.K. variant B.1.1.7), it is not apparent to me.

The usual graphs follow, with a few bits of commentary.

Yesterday, there was a roughly 50/50 split between states showing increase and decreases in new cases that day.  That’s consistent with the lack of any strong trend.  And if you look at the lines for individuals states (in the regional graphs), you’ll see that there are now quite a few of them with a weak upward trend in new cases per day.  And the rest continue a weak downward trend.

All states, by six regional groupings.  These are all on a log scale.

I think the first graph pretty well illustrates the phrase ” … ceases to be a trend”.

Northeast.   The little finger sticking up at the end is New Jersey.  By eye, seems like a lot of states have a slight upward slope these days.

South Atlantic:  The little figure at the end there is Delaware, which clearly had one of those data-reporting catchups in the past few days.  That’ll be gone in a week.

South-Central states had their data reporting strongly perturbed by the power outages following the mid-February winter storm event.  If you were to take out those various “speed bump”, they remain a cohesive group.

Midwest matches the topgraphy:  Mostly flat.  Two large states stand out for having increases in cases, as discussed yesterday and above.

Mountain states:  Not a lot of cohesive behavior there.

Pacific:  Declines in new case counts in California continue unabated.  Majority of states are below 10 new cases / 100,000 / day.

School re-opening remains a topic of interest.  I’d like to get my hands on some current data showing new case rates by age, nationally.  The idea being to look at this issue of growth of cases in the high-school-age population, in those states where in-person high school classes have resumed.  (And to validate that the decline in new cases among the elderly matches the vaccination rate there.)

So far, I haven’t found that.  The only place I can get that information nationally is the CDC’s person-level public use file, and that tends to be weeks out of date, suspect as to data quality.  And that doesn’t even show the state of residence, in any case.

Even within individual states, I typically cannot find trend (historical) data on cases by age. You’d think that with school re-opening being an issue, states would make an effort to make that information available.

I started out by looking at Virginia’s data.  Virginia has provided the age-breakout data from (nearly) the beginning of the pandemic.  It never occurred to me that the equivalent information would not be available in all states.  But it simply isn’t.   This makes me appreciate the quality of the data produced by the Commonwealth of Virginia.  Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until you take a look around and see what else is available.  Which, in this case, appears to be more-or-less nothing.

 

The only thing that I see as interesting is the continued uptick in new case rates in the Midwest.  That’s due to slow increase in a couple of fairly populous states.  Otherwise, nationally, new case rates continue to drift downward. Continue reading Post #1055: Trend to 3/13/2021. Just read yesterday’s post.

There are slowing declines in new case counts, and a far-from-uniform national picture.    The individual regional “threads” continue to unravel at the end of the national rope.  Day-to-day, daily new cases fall in the majority of states. Continue reading Post #1054: Trend to 3/12/2021